Does management consulting have a history?

A history lesson in 14 minutes? As someone who dropped history as a school subject the moment I could, that has a certain appeal but the latest instalment of BBC Radio 4’s “Magic Consultants” entitled “The History” felt like it was too short.

That said, this instalment in the three-part series that promises to “peek behind the curtain of the $billion management consultancy industry” was an improvement on the rather snarky first episode and for any casual Radio 4 listeners who might have wondered why The Life Scientific wasn’t on, it was a good summary of the industry’s development.

The Big Con author Rosie Collington divided the emergence consulting into three periods, starting in the late 19th century with groups of engineers forming themselves into consultancy companies, resulting in the establishment by Arthur D. Little in 1886 of the world’s first consulting company. As Frederick Taylor’s Scientific Management approach took off in the early 20th Century, independent consultants worked to promote them. McKinsey then arrived, initially focused on cost accounting and then the rest is history, as they say. Matthias Kipping, co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Management Consulting attributed the growth to the desire by clients for control of their increasingly large organisations, particularly after the second world war. Consultants offered the possibility of control and clients were prepared to pay for it.

I’m sure the interviews quoted from took more time and went into more detail but the restricted format meant we bounced from the evolution and history into The One Interesting Fact that I learnt, which was that Tony Benn, firebrand left-winger and minister in various UK Governments was a serial user of consultants, hiring McKinsey when Postmaster General to, apparently, provide external validation of his ideas to bring efficiencies to the postal service. He then went on to hire consultants a further 11 times. The history of consultants and their role in the British state is an interesting topic that’s covered more extensively in contributor Antonio Weiss’s PhD thesis which is well worth reading. (It’s also an area that I have personal experience of, having spent a year early in my consulting career working alongside Accenture (then Andersen Consulting) at the Department of Social Security. It’s probably fair to say that that time shaped my view of consultancy as a profession as much as my subsequent years’ work have done.)

The consulting scam-busters then raised their head with an observation – unsubstantiated but undoubtedly not wrong – that consultants would consult to multi-nationals on how to expand, then consult to companies in the countries that they were expanding into on how to resist or compete. I don’t know… this sounds like a smart business idea to me but maybe my years of consulting have corrupted my moral judgement.

McKinsey’s moral judgement took a light battering through their connection with Enron. Apparently all the other companies associated with the accounting scandal suffered as a result but McKinsey sustained only some reputational damage. It seems to me the programme let them off the hook: McKinsey’s role in the US opioid crisis and corruption in South Africa would have given the makers a much more juicy story but maybe “consultancy avoids blame” fits better than “consultancy admits wrongdoing and pays fines” fits better with the programme’s assumption that management consultants are Oz-style wizards hiding behind smoke and mirrors.

I think this series could – in the manner of some of the BBC’s podcasts – have been titled “Obsessed with McKinsey” as the firm gets more mentions than all the others put together. If I were a partner at EY, Deloitte, PwC or Accenture I’d be quite miffed by this focus but as a freelance, independent consultant, I’m particularly miffed that all consultants are tarred with the same brush as McKinsey, however lightly that tar might be applied. All the consultants I know – who these days are largely independent or in small firms – conduct their work with integrity and a focus on client value. Sadly this doesn’t make for such an interesting angle for the programme to take.

If you’re interested in how management consulting might have a future based on sound values as well as a history, take a look at CMCE’s website and LinkedIn page.